From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um.

Answering those questions that make you go.

Moment of Um, um, comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Molly Bloom.

Picture this. It's a warm spring night and you're having dinner with your family in your backyard.

Your lemon pasta is pretty tasty, but it needs a little something. Pass me the salt, you say to your dad, and as he reaches towards you with the salt,

bam, your baby sister knocks the salt shaker out of his hand and down to the ground.

You look down and, oh no, the salt landed on a backyard snail.

What's a snail even doing in your backyard?

And is it going to be okay? Angelo had a great question about this.

Hi, my name is Angela from Rockville, Maryland.

My question is what happens to snails when you put salt on them and why?

My name is Tim Pierce. I'm curator of mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Sometimes people ask what happens if you put salt on a snail. First, I would say, it's really

pretty cruel. Imagine what would happen if you put salt up your nose. Probably not very comfortable.

Well, the outside of a snail is like the inside of your nose. It's a

mucus membrane. So mucus is another name for the slime in your nose or the slime on the outside

of a snail. So the snail is producing mucus, just like your nose is. And when you put something

irritating in your nose, like salt, then you produce more mucus. Same thing with the

snail. So if you put salt on the snail, the salt is irritating for the snail, and the snail will

start to produce mucus to try and get rid of the salt or get away from the salt. If you put a little

bit of salt on a snail, then the snail can probably counteract it and maybe crawl away before anything bad happens. But if you put a little bit of salt on a snail, then the snail can probably counteract it and

maybe crawl away before anything bad happens.

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